The present invention relates to a database system such as map/drawing information processing, and also to a matching method between the databases.
Conventional systems for performing multimedia processing of figures and images utilizing the graphic features of workstations have been developed. The conventional multimedia processing operations have been proposed in, for instance, Nikkei Computer publication "Map Information System Highly Expected as a Tool for Strategy Information System" issued on Aug. 14, 1989, pages 75 to 85, in which the map database has been previously linked with the attribute database oriented to, or associated with, a business use, or application, and the retrieval operation is performed with respect to the linked data.
As a second conventional technique, there is a report on such a forming method for an information guiding database, in which the map database is linked with the telephone directory database functioning as the attribute database associated with the business use, and the highly valuable databases may be established ("Consideration on Linking Method between Telephone Directory Database and Map Database" reported at 70th anniversary of Electronic Information Communication Institute, page 6-91). In this publication, to increase the linkage rate of the name part between two databases, the name part is divided into the words which are furthermore classified with the attributes so as to compare the words with each other.
As a third conventional technique expanded from the second conventional technique, such a method has been described which employs the hierarchical dictionary capable of handling the synonyms and also abbreviated words related to the respective words classified with the attributes thereof in order to increase the linkage rate ("Consideration on Linking Method between Telephone Directory Database and Map Database (No. 2)" reported at conference for information system group of Electronic Information Communication Institute, page 1-111).
However, there are various problems in the matching operations between the databases to handle such maps and figures.
As a first problem, a large quantity of synonyms and abbreviated words have been contained in the name part registered in the database. However, the structure of the hierarchical thesaurus dictionary has been described in only a portion of these conventional methods. No concrete method for inferring the synonyms and abbreviated words based upon the key words has been proposed.
There is a second problem in that, although the matching operation may be mutually performed when the map database has been previously linked, or matched with the attribute database oriented to the business use (for instance, customer attribute database) in one-to-one correspondence, no retrieval operation is carried out when the matching operation is executed between the mutually not linked databases.
The above-described conventional methods do not provide a better solution, taking these problems into account.